Rwanda wants to oust Kabila & block U.N. probe Official at U.N. Sees
Suppressing Hutu-Massacre Query as Motive State Department Opposes Presence of Rwanda Troops.
Rwanda is backing the war to oust Laurent Kabila as president of the Democratic Republic of Congo because Rwanda's rulers are determined to permanently block the United Nations from investigating the alleged killing of as many as 180,000 Hutus during the war to topple dictator Mobutu, an official at the organization has told The Black Star News. "The Congolese had no motive to commit massacres. Their enemy was simply Mobutu," the official, who comes from an African country, said yesterday in an interview.
"I have no indication on that," said Myriam Dessables, a spokesperson at U.N. headquarters in New York, when asked about the alleged Rwanda motive. "I can't comment on what this person has said. This is not documented as such anywhere." She noted that written communications between the U.N. and the DRC confirms that the Congolese had indeed stated that they were ready to permit the investigation, however this did not stop the investigators from being harassed and frustrated once they arrived there, she said.
Asked whether it was the Congolese who appeared to create the problems or the Rwandese there, Dessables said: "I don't think that we know these kind of details. What's relevant is that the authorities that were identified as such were putting obstacles to the mission."
A spokesman at the U.S. state department said, "That's the first I've heard of that," when asked about the alleged Rwanda motive for the war. "We have said that we are opposed to foreign intervention in the Congo and we have also said we are opposed to Rwandan troops in the region."
Officials at Rwanda's Washington, D.C., office did not respond to an inquiry yesterday; separately, the DRC's U.N. representative, Andre Kapanga, did not return a call. In an earlier interview, he said his country was fighting an invasion from Rwanda and Uganda.
However, the official at the United Nations who insisted he not be identified said the Congolese were helpless once Rwanda, which backed Kabila and was instrumental in toppling Mobutu, decided to block the investigation. After all, this official said, Rwandese officers commanded the new Congo army until they were expelled July 27 by Kabila. The official said a U.N. investigation linking Rwanda to the killings would compromise the moral argument to rule Rwanda by that country's Tutsi minority, who are seen as having halted the 1994 genocide there. In those killings as many as 500,000 to a million Tutsis and some Hutus are widely reported to have perished.
Many Hutu civilians, including women and children, fled to what was then Zaire after the Hutu militias blamed for the 1994 genocide were defeated by the Rwanda Patriotic Front, the largely Tutsi force. Some of these refugees are the ones believed to have been massacred as Kabila's Rwanda-backed forces swept Mobutu's army from power.
On April 17 this year, Kofi Annan, U.N. Secretary General, threw in the towel and called off the investigation of the alleged massacres after the U.N. team was repeatedly denied access to locations of suspected mass graves. In one incident investigators had to flee for their lives while looking into a suspected mass grave in the village of Wendji; they were confronted by people in what's believed to have been a government orchestrated protest. In another incident, an investigator was arrested and had his report copied by the authorities, possibly compromising the safety of witnesses.
After the U.N. team was pulled, the Security Council in July called on the governments of the DRC and of Rwanda to conduct investigations into the alleged atrocities and report on the status to the Council by October 15. "This is exactly when we are going to see what happens," said Dessables.
A report by the Secretary General's investigating team stopped short of calling the alleged killings genocide. It documented numerous instances of how the team was prevented from completing its work.
The current fighting in the DRC flared on Aug.2. DRC officials insist they are fighting an invasion; both Rwanda and Uganda continue to deny their involvement. However, there is a pattern; both consistently denied playing a role in the war to topple Mobutu until after the fact.
The fighting could potentially escalate as Zimbabwe has announced that it intends to militarily intervene on behalf of Kabila. Additionally Namibia, Angola, Kenya and Zambia have also said they will side with Kinshasa.